Discover the Versatile Beauty of Bible Translations

[Evo]

Do you have a favorite translation? And what do you like about that particular translation?

To give people that aren't familiar a sample of how much the meaning can change form one version to another, here is a great site that let's you compare verses amoung the 13 most popular translations. Just click on an author on the left and compare passages.

http://www.hartzler.org/trans/index.html

 

[arildno]

I only have an awful prose "translation" of the Aeneid.
Didn't know it was a prose translation until after I had bought it.

Nobody EVER cares about MY problems!

 

[Evo]

I only have an awful prose "translation" of the Aeneid.
Didn't know it was a prose translation until after I had bought it.

Nobody EVER cares about MY problems!

That's terrible! I care Arildno. I actually like the original 1513 translation by Gavin Douglas, but he's criticised -

"So it would appear, only too clearly, from these interesting prologues, that Douglas’s literary attitude was not modern, and that he is not even so much a Janus-pet as his positions and opportunities would warrant. When we separate him from his literary neighbours, it must be as a dilettante.

Probably, the main interest of the translation, and of most of Douglas’s work, is philological. No Scot has built up such a diction, drawn from all sources, full of forgotten tags of alliterative romance, Chaucerian English, dialectal borrowings from Scandinavian, French, Latin. No one is harder to interpret. Literary merit is not wanting; yet, in those passages, and especially in his Aeneid, which strike the reader most, by the vigorous, often onomatopoeic force of the vocabulary, the pleasure is not what he who knows his Vergil expects, and must demand. The excellence of such a description as that of Acheron—

With holl bisme, 38 and hiduus swelth wnrude,
Drumlie of mud, and scaldand as it wer wod, 39
Popland 40 and bullerand 41 furth on athir hand
Onto Cochitus all his slik 42 and sand,

is not the excellence of the original. " ptthhhbbbtttttt

Note 38. abysm.
Note 39. mad, wild.
Note 40. “bubbling.”
Note 41. roaring, “boiling.”
Note 42. slime, wet mud.

http://www.bartleby.com/212/1016.html

excerpts of Douglas's translation http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/708.html

 

[arildno]

Thank you, Evo!
In return, I'll have a closer look at the links to see which one I prefer.

 

[turbo]

The Scottish translation looks tough to get through. I have trouble enough with Burns' "To a Mouse" - 'Gang aft agley' indeed!

 

[Manchot]

Yes, I do have a favorite translation: my own. I took Latin for four years in high school, and most of my senior year was spent translating the Aeneid to prepare for the AP Latin Literature test. Unfortunately, I threw most of it away. I really regret that.

 

[Evo]

Yes, I do have a favorite translation: my own. I took Latin for four years in high school, and most of my senior year was spent translating the Aeneid to prepare for the AP Latin Literature test. Unfortunately, I threw most of it away. I really regret that.

How could you do that?

 

[HallsofIvy]

Interesting link, evo, thanks.

Another example, I ran across some time ago is of Wagner's opera "Das Rhinegold". When someone asks Odin why he does simply step into prevent his children (by a human woman) having to endure such tragedy, he says that he cannot change fate with the words
"Er geht sein weg"- literally, "He goes his way".

A popular English translation rendered that as "His weird he shall dree"!

 

[Evo]

A popular English translation rendered that as "His weird he shall dree"!

Yeah, that makes sense...

 

[danoonez]

University of Dallas uses Fitzgerald's translation.

 

[arildno]

Well, actually, I liked Dryden's best (E).

 

[Evo]

Well, actually, I liked Dryden's best (E).

I like it too.

 

[arildno]

There were a few that "jarred" in my ears, but perhaps the metrics of those are closer to the original than Dryden's?